


no one is lost

by Iambic



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: M/M, Magical Realism, Rating May Change, Tags May Change
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-10
Updated: 2017-02-20
Packaged: 2018-09-23 07:18:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9646019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Iambic/pseuds/Iambic
Summary: This much is the same: Yuuri vanishes abruptly from the public eye after a failed performance. Viktor, hoping Yuuri has something that can inspire him, tracks him down. But the music Yuuri makes with his body is literal, not figurative—and unless he can settle his nerves, it may never be music again.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Tofsla for the summary assistance and also holding my hand through the writing process. I'm aiming for weekly updates, work and health allowing. 
> 
> Chapter count is an estimate, much like the tag list. Rating will also be established as the story progresses.

It hadn’t been luck that brought him out to the old shipping yard on Makkachin’s evening walk, because Viktor doesn’t _do_ luck. Absolutely immune, as his grandmother said, tutting. Even the charm she gave him, passed traditionally from mother to daughter, had done nothing noticeable.

Viktor doesn’t do luck. What good comes of his life has always involved hard work or easy privilege. A private joke: the great Nikiforov, master composer, is in this way utterly mundane.

It’s as comforting as it is discouraging.

No, he’s simply exploring the familiar textures of concrete and corrugated iron, chain link and weeds. Hasetsu had apparently once boasted a much larger harbor, but as the town had emptied out, so had the business. Very few of the warehouses seem to be in use, and the docks themselves have been blocked off with stern-looking signs Viktor can’t quite read.

It’s not luck that his ears pick up a faint strain of music, either. But it is a surprise.

_So you’ve found yourself again._

A left turn toward the water, and right around a flaking yellow crate, and there he is.

The song—it takes Viktor a moment to recognize, distracted as he is by the man dancing to it—is Viktor’s composition, but a countermelody told in dark piano and muted brass. With the dip of Yuuri’s arm follow descending arpeggios. In the half-pause of his leg stretched up and behind him rings out an aching suspended chord. He spins back inwards, and the way his arms sway looks nearly incomplete, as though he reaches for an absent lover, only to turn away from the empty air. Yuuri raises his eyes with a swell in his music—

—and with the cacophony of a smashed piano, stumbles. All sound cuts out as he freezes in place.

For a moment they stare at one another in shaken silence, Yuuri slowly turning red.

“Yuuri,” Viktor says, and his voice comes out hoarse and hushed.

A rock, broken free from its mooring, skids across the shelf below; Yuuri jerks back and then stills again. There’s recognition in his face, but Viktor can scarcely tell beyond the way Yuuri’s eyes widen in horror.

“No one was supposed to hear.” If Viktor had spoken quietly, Yuuri’s voice is a strangled whisper. “Especially not…”

Viktor knows how that sentence ends, and his heart breaks for it. The last time they had spoken, Yuuri had begged, pleaded for Viktor to see him dance. Even after all that happened, Viktor had always intended to keep that promise.

He reaches forward to tilt Yuuri’s face up, the easier for them to meet eyes, and Yuuri glances toward Viktor’s hand and away but still doesn’t move. “Yuuri,” he says again, the name sweet on his tongue, “I knew you were talented before, but—”

“No,” says Yuuri, and, “stop, please.”

Viktor lets his hand fall.

“Forgive me,” he says, and puts on a smile he finds not entirely feigned. “How would you prefer to be touched, then?”

“Not _that_ ,” Yuuri replies, too quickly, and then suddenly his blush returns with added vigor. “I mean—that’s not what I—just—” He draws in a slow breath, and then slowly relaxes his shoulders with the wheeze of a punctured air pump. “You’re _Viktor Nikiforov_.”

“And you’re Yuuri Katsuki. Should I shake your hand?”

Yuuri’s shoulders stiffen even further with the faintest crunch. “You weren’t ever supposed to hear me like this,” he repeats.

The strike to the interior of Viktor’s chest should have made its own sound.

In all the ways he had imagined their next meeting, he hadn’t considered that Yuuri might not have meant his invitation in earnest. The fantasy about locking eyes and running into each other’s arms had been admittedly unrealistic, but he’d taken for granted that Yuuri would at least want to see him again.

Beyond them, the sea. The gulls cry just like in St Petersburg, but the ocean air doesn’t smell the same. Hadn’t he read somewhere that the colder the water, the less salt it carries? Maybe that makes a difference. There’s a breeze ruffling Yuuri’s hair, but if Yuuri shivers, the noise around them swallows the sound of it. Yuuri in Hasetsu isn’t quite the same, either—softer in figure, but worn at the edges, and with new bags under his eyes.

Makkachin whuffs, and both Viktor and Yuuri look down to him. “Oh,” says Viktor, “this is Makkachin. I was taking him for a walk…”

He winces, but Yuuri’s attention has relocated entirely to the dog. Makkachin, his request met, starts licking Yuuri’s chin almost immediately after Yuuri starts scratching at his shoulders with the sound of maracas. Almost instantly Yuuri’s shoulders begin to relax.

“Who’s a good boy,” Yuuri mumbles as he presses his face into Makkachin’s curls, and somewhere behind Viktor’s lungs a silent ache begins to bloom.

Sometime in the past, Yuuri had once had a poodle of his own. Named after Viktor himself, he’d admitted, face turning redder than what the cold and the drinking had done. It’s different seeing Yuuri actually interacting with Makkachin, hearing the machine-clunk sound of his scratching. Makkachin has become fairly calm in his old age, but you wouldn’t know it by the eager wagging of his stubby tail, or his paws up on Yuuri’s shoulders so he can slobber all over Yuuri’s face.

Viktor is not jealous of his dog. He’s _not_. But he does want to join in. In the garden, back in San Francisco, Yuuri had slipped under Viktor’s arm, had held him firm and close when they danced, had leaned against him as the night turned early. Viktor hadn’t realized how touch-starved he had been until that night, but since then he’s been all too aware.

Maybe it’s been that way for Yuuri, too.

Well. Viktor refuses to let that stand.

“Walk with us!” he says, reaching down to touch Yuuri’s shoulder. “If you’re done dancing, that is.”

In an instant Yuuri stiffens again. His smile for Makkachin shrinks away as quickly as it came, and his hands fall away from Makkachin’s fur. Slowly he stands up and very carefully avoids meeting Viktor’s eyes. He says, “Yeah, I’m done.”

 

 

 

The woman running out of Yu-topia has missed the mark for professional attire: bleached hair, haori ragged where the sleeves sit just shy of her wrists, apron haphazardly tied in place and slipping askew. She and Yuuri show stress with the same curve of the brow. A sister, most likely. She had not been around when Viktor checked in.

“Oh, Yuuri, there you are!” she calls, and slows her steps.  “Where were you? That guy you…”

She trails off, noticing Viktor, who smiles widely in case she’ll finish her sentence. “Oh,” she says, switching seamlessly to English; so much for all those hours on Duolingo. “I guess you already met him.”

Yuuri’s widened eyes dart between them, like he’s nervous, like he’s trapped.

“Well? Come on,” the woman says, and then something in Japanese too quick and accented for Viktor’s still-learning ears to catch. A shame. Whatever she’d told him, it’s making Yuuri blush such a lovely red.

Inside, Mrs Katsuki is all smiles, even as she reprimands her son for his poor hospitality—something about suitcases and the onsen, so far as Viktor can tell through her accent, even thicker than her daughter’s. Then, in English to Viktor: “Welcome back, Nikiforov-san! Your walk, good?”

She looks a lot like Yuuri, round of face and easily expressive. When Viktor had first checked in she had been friendly as well, but now that he accompanied her son, she positively beamed at him. “A very good walk,” Viktor replies. “I even found what I was looking for.” He turns to grin at Yuuri, who looks away quickly, as if he’d been staring.

As Yuuri leads them through the inn, he keeps his eyes averted other than a few more glances he seems to think he’s stealing. He talks in fits and starts, pointing something out and then lapsing into awkward silence. Somehow, against all evidence to the contrary, Yuuri is proving to be of all things _shy_ in public. Soft-spoken. Timid, even. Whatever drove him from the stage seems to have left more than a few marks.

Viktor has always prided himself on his conversational skills, but now he finds himself casting around for a distraction as Yuuri takes them by the guest rooms. It’s not the first time Yuuri’s left him at a loss for words, but this time the silence between them isn’t exactly comfortable. They’re running out of tour, too. Oh, but–

“I haven’t tried the hot spring yet!”

As far as excuses go, it would be a good one if his intentions weren’t already completely transparent. Yuuri lets it slide without even a sideways look, no objection whatsoever, even when it means turning around to go back down the wooden hallway from whence they can. “Ah,” he says after a second, pausing, “unless you want to get clothes or something from your room…”

Yuuri’s giving him an opening. He trails behind Viktor to the frame of the door and then lingers just outside, and only after a confused moment does Viktor remember to invite him in. Still Yuuri hesitates before stepping inside. His tentative footsteps crack and scatter across the floor. He seems—afraid?

How could that be?

“Yuuri,” Viktor says, and he hadn’t really meant to use that tone of voice, but he can work the flirtatious angle too. That night in San Francisco Viktor had felt Yuuri’s breath on his lips, a distance that could have been resolved just by lifting his chin. Nothing had happened. They had only tasted the alcohol on each other’s breath. Yuuri had leaned forward and away with the drawn-out bowing of a single cello string.

Here and now Yuuri flushes a faint pink, mouth falling just so slightly open, but he also freezes in place with widening eyes. An upsetting thought: could Viktor be a bad memory to him? _You were never supposed to hear_ , he’d said.

But no, there’s no point in jumping to conclusions just yet. He’ll just back up a bit. It _has_ been a while, and they’ve only met once before. No matter how intense a first meeting it was. “Will you let me get to know you, the man behind the music?” He steps forward to take one of Yuuri’s hands between his. “After all, if we are to work together, we should start from the beginning, yes?”

Yuuri looks down to their hands, then up to Viktor’s face, then away, and back again, a set of hollow clicks. “I.” He finally meets Viktor’s eyes for longer than half a second. “What?”

A beat passes for Viktor to realise he’s forgotten to share a crucial piece of information. No wonder Yuuri seems so confused. Smiling wide and open, Viktor lifts their hands and moves in a step. “Yuuri Katsuki,” he says in his best showman’s voice, “starting today, you and I are collaborating on your comeback performance.”

Yuuri’s responding explosion of sound is gratifying, if a little straining on the eardrums.


	2. Chapter 2

As it happens, they don’t actually start that day. Yuuri had jerked back, stammered some kind of excuse, and fled the room. Over dinner, Viktor tries to catch Yuuri’s eye whenever Yuuri bustles past with some plate or another, hoping for some kind of reaction or another—another blush, or wide eyes, or anything indicating what he could be thinking about. How he could be feeling.

He gives Viktor nothing. When Viktor beams a smile his way, he responds with an utterly flat expression and then walks on.

“I still haven’t tried the onsen yet!” Viktor says after dinner, catching Yuuri by the edge of his sleeve. “Will you—”

“Go on, enjoy,” Yuuri cuts in, and crackles out of Viktor’s grasp.

He corners Yuuri later in the evening, by the door separating inn from home. Yuuri sighs, opens his mouth to issue another rejection; Viktor reaches across to lay a hand on Yuuri’s shoulder. Through his shirt, his skin is warm. If Viktor could touch him bare—

He can’t. He doesn’t. He says, “Can I show you something?”

Yuuri looks down to Viktor’s hand, brings his gaze slowly up Viktor’s arm, and _finally_ meets Viktor’s eyes. His face shifts minutely, softens. Cloth in a breeze in Viktor’s ears.

“Okay,” Yuuri says.

 

 

At the door to Viktor’s room, Yuuri hesitates, but he steps in this time to join Viktor in sitting at the foot of the bed. This time when Viktor smiles at him, he nervously smiles back.

While the laptop boots up, Viktor settles it on their laps, and rests his left hand against Yuuri’s back, propping him up. It’s not a perfect imitation, but he’ll wait until Yuuri relaxes into his touch before pulling him closer. It’s just them, now, no performance necessary. Nothing to be anxious about, once Yuuri calms down.

“I’m so glad I finally found you,” Viktor says as he types in his password. “You’re a very difficult man to track down, Yuuri Katsuki.”

He looks back up; Yuuri is staring at him, brows knit over widened eyes. Viktor hadn’t really had the chance to study Yuuri’s eyes the night they first met, but here in the lamplight they glow a warm brown that Viktor can almost feel. Something shifts beneath his sternum. He wants to pull Yuuri closer with an intensity he can barely resist, but manages only take Yuuri’s hand in his.

It breaks the staredown, Yuuri looking instead to their hands as if presented by a question he can’t answer. When he speaks, he still doesn’t look up. “You were… looking for me?”

A strange thing to ask. Viktor hadn’t only promised to see him perform. “Is that so surprising?”

“You’re _Viktor Nikiforov_ ,” Yuuri says, an echo of the afternoon. “And I’m just, just a dime a dozen dancer who had a chance and wasted it.” He tugs his hand free, a car scraping against a concrete highway barrier, and flinches with the sound. “Whatever you think I have, I don’t have it anymore.”

He can have the last word in that exchange. Viktor opens his browser and loads from his bookmarks the video. Behind them, Makkachin jumps onto the bed and whuffles forward into Yuuri’s reach, because he is the best of dogs. When Viktor glances over again, there’s a faint smile playing in the creases below Yuuri’s eyes.

It’s something.

“Yuuri,” Viktor says, and lightly touches Yuuri’s shoulder. Yuuri holds himself still for the briefest of moments. When he turns slowly back to Viktor, though, that hint of a smile fades but does not vanish. “I wanted to show you something, remember?”

He hits play and full screens it before Yuuri can see the title and object. Granted, this only buys half a second before Yuuri stiffens beside him.

The song Viktor still knows well, having spent far too long recording and performing it in the early days of his success. He rarely performs it now. Audiences seem to have forgotten much of his early work, and for the best—it’s hard enough to keep surprising them even within his current repertoire, and he’s vastly improved since then anyway. Still. The song carries a certain amount of personal relevance. But to see Yuuri dance it—

The camera shakes. The sound quality could be better. But the music, the motions, transmute this amateur recording and outdated composition into something otherworldly.

Whoever had taken the video had ended it barely into the second movement, just as Yuuri had shifted into some kind of flamenco step, and Viktor had stayed awake far too long that night, trying to picture what direction the dance might have taken in the dark staccato that builds from that moment, heart fluttering, a hand over his mouth. The next morning, he had unlocked and opened the upright piano, coughing with the dust displaced.

“This is why,” Viktor says, voice soft, leaning in toward Yuuri’s ear. The rustle of leaves: Yuuri, shivering.

Then Yuuri abruptly pushes aside the laptop fully onto Viktor’s lap and stands. “I,” he stammers, “it’s late, I should go and. Sleep. Um. Good night!”

He’s out the door before Viktor can respond.

 

 

In the morning Yuuri is conspicuously absent. Hiroko Katsuki must see something in Viktor’s expression, because she chuckles when she brings his breakfast. This early, no one else seems to be showing their faces either. Then again, Viktor only saw a few other doors near his room; the business probably picks up later in the day. It’s nice, though, the quiet. A novelty.

“You’re looking for Yuuri,” Hiroko says. “Usually this early he sleeps.”

It’s easy to smile at Yuuri’s mother and mean it, with her sunny disposition and the same eyes as her son. But even without her connection to Yuuri, Viktor would probably have taken to her immediately. “Usually?”

She shakes her head, but it doesn’t seem to be in response to Viktor. “Since he was young, he skates when he thinks.”

Finger to his lips, Viktor hums, buzzing in the back of his throat. “What a coincidence!” he exclaims, widening his smile. Turning on the charm, perhaps, but without the resignation that usually goes along with it. “There’s an ice rink here?”

Hiroko frowns momentarily, then repeats the English phrase slowly back at him. “You mean, frozen? Blades?” When Viktor nods, her face clears and she’s smiling again. “Not anymore. Now he has skates with wheels.”

 

 

Roller Castle Hasetsu is just as easy to find as Hiroko had claimed. It doesn’t look like much from outside, but the faded sign and dated architecture give it a certain character. Viktor spends most of his time in big cities these days, where the ice rinks are either tourist attractions or used professionally, and in his youth he had skated outside in winter with all the rest of the kids in St Petersburg. This rink looks like something out of an old American movie where the boys would have big pompadours and the girls wore even bigger skirts.

The rink is also closed, according to the sign on the door, but Hiroko had also mentioned Yuuri’s friendship with the family who own it. “He likes his space,” she had added. “Even before he came home.”

Viktor knocks carefully at the glass doors, then steps back. If no one were to come and let him in, waiting outside wouldn’t be a terrible alternative; the sky is blue, gulls cry overhead, and he can smell the sea only a block or so away. A sleepy little town. Something eases in his shoulders, a release of a pressure he hadn’t even noticed until it fell away. It feels, he decides, like a home.

Like one of Yuuri’s sounds, the door unlocks and croons open. Viktor meets the eyes of a shocked young woman in a blue and white jacket with a logo to match the sign above them. “You’re Viktor Nikiforov!” she exclaims in easy English. “Um, we’re closed right now, but you’re looking for Yuuri, right?”

Viktor smiles down at her; he’d known in the abstract that his average height in much of Europe would make him fairly tall here, but it is another thing entirely to find himself towering over most of the people he has met. Yuuri, Viktor has begun to realise, is himself a tall man when compared to his family and friends here. “Is he inside?”

“Just through that blue door,” the woman says, gesturing behind her. “I can’t rent you skates, though, and maybe—” she pauses to bite her lip in thought— “No, he’s been there for a while. Go ahead. Oh! I’m Nishigori Yuuko, if you ever have any questions or want to skate during hours.”

She steps aside so that Viktor can pass through the door, and bows her head in acknowledgement when Viktor thanks her.

The rink itself is silent but for the roll and clack of Yuuri’s skates, the knock and swish of his fluid movement. With well-practiced precision he steps into a spin and then effortlessly curves out again, backwards now. Now, he takes a lap around the rink. Now, he accelerates through the turn with quick crossover steps. There doesn’t seem to be a specific routine guiding him, only a concrete percussion echoing against the high walls and unmuted ceiling.

It’s different from usual style of dancing—heavier, staccato—but complementary all the same. Blunt, rather than expressive. Carrying, somehow, a sense of frustration, maybe even anger. He’s not wearing glasses and his eyes are shut; he’s listening to something through earbuds. He’s completely cut off from the world around him. The rhythm of it reverberates in Viktor’s very bones.

It’s spellbinding.

Time must pass while he watches, but only around him, until Yuuri comes to a smooth stop and opens his eyes. He startles when he notices Viktor, and squints even when he reaches the edge of the rink and lets Viktor hand him his glasses.

“Um, hello?” he says, peering at Viktor through the thick lenses. “What are you doing here?” His eyes narrow further. It’s painfully charming. “Are you _following_ me?”

Pull yourself _together_ , Nikiforov. “Of course I am! How am I going to get to know you otherwise?” He reconstructs his smile from the where his mouth had fallen open somewhere along the way. “Am I bothering you? I can go.”

Yuuri stares at him for another long moment. His hand hovers halfway to the hair that has begun to fall into his eyes. “No,” he says, eventually, “I’m done here.”

They leave together, waving goodbye to Yuuko in the entrance. Yuuri pauses at the top of the steps, though, shading his eyes with his right hand to look out across the street while he leans over the railing and braces himself with the left. Viktor can’t help himself; he snaps a picture. Like the way Yuuri’s skating complements his dancing, Yuuri in Hasetsu’s daylight moves in reverse from Yuuri in that park beneath the stars over San Francisco. Closed off in many ways, but—something about him seems—

There’s something honest about seeing him in his hometown.

“You never performed my composition outside of the studio,” Viktor says after a moment. Anticipating the hesitation, he shuts his eyes briefly. Turns his face into the breeze. The air still carries a chill, but the sun above them has heated his hair: summer, lying in wait.

Yuuri’s mouth shifts in a crinkle of paper, not a smile but a wince. He doesn’t quite meet Viktor’s eyes when Viktor looks his way. “I wanted to. But we couldn’t afford the license.” A beat, and then his eyes widen, alarm written all over his face. “Oh, no. If they uploaded it…”

Never before had Viktor regretted handing control over licensing to his publisher until this moment. Somewhere in all of that paperwork he’d avoided, Yuuri had reached out to him, and he hadn’t even been there to hear. If he’d paid better attention, he could have found Yuuri years before he did. Maybe, if he’d been there, he could have helped—

He’ll do what he can now.

Hand coming to rest on Yuuri’s shoulder, Viktor smiles. “I’ll contact them, don’t worry. They never should have turned you down. A performance like yours should be shared.”

Yuuri doesn’t pull away, but he looks off into the distance, and there’s sorrow in his face.

“It’s okay,” he says, soft and heavy, “you don’t have to do that.” Another hesitation. Yuuri shuts his eyes. “Let’s just go back.”

He doesn’t flee this time, but his steps snap like twigs, and Viktor can’t find the words in time to call him back.


End file.
